Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.

The process of perceiving speech begins at the level of the sound signal and the process of audition. (For a complete description of the process of audition see Hearing.) After processing the initial auditory signal, speech sounds are further processed to extract acoustic cues and phonetic information. This speech information can then be used for higher-level language processes, such as word recognition.

Acoustic cues are sensory cues contained in the speech sound signal which are used in speech perception to differentiate speech sounds belonging to different phonetic categories. For example, one of the most studied cues in speech is voice onset time or VOT. VOT is a primary cue signaling the difference between voiced and voiceless plosives, such as "b" and "p". Other cues differentiate sounds that are produced at different places of articulation or manners of articulation. The speech system must also combine these cues to determine the category of a specific speech sound. This is often thought of in terms of abstract representations of phonemes. These representations can then be combined for use in word recognition and other language processes.

It is not easy to identify what acoustic cues listeners are sensitive to when perceiving a particular speech sound:

At first glance, the solution to the problem of how we perceive speech seems deceptively simple. If one could identify stretches of the acoustic waveform that correspond to units of perception, then the path from sound to meaning would be clear. However, this correspondence or mapping has proven extremely difficult to find, even after some forty-five years of research on the problem.

If a specific aspect of the acoustic waveform indicated one linguistic unit, a series of tests using speech synthesizers would be sufficient to determine such a cue or cues. However, there are two significant obstacles:

Although listeners perceive speech as a stream of discrete units (phonemes, syllables, and words), this linearity is difficult to see in the physical speech signal (see Figure 2 for an example). Speech sounds do not strictly follow one another, rather, they overlap. A speech sound is influenced by the ones that precede and the ones that follow. This influence can even be exerted at a distance of two or more segments (and across syllable- and word-boundaries).

Because the speech signal is not linear, there is a problem of segmentation. It is difficult to delimit a stretch of speech signal as belonging to a single perceptual unit. As an example, the acoustic properties of the phoneme /d/ will depend on the production of the following vowel (because of coarticulation).